Bruce Handy on Culture

If for some reason you’ve been wanting to see Idina Menzel play Hamlet—and what better role to follow Elphaba in Wicked, Elsa in Frozen, Rachel’s mom on Glee, and Adele Nazeem at last month’s Oscars? —now is sort of your chance. No one is poisoned or drowned or stabbed in If/Then, Menzel’s new show which opened on Broadway this week, plus her character is named Elizabeth, the show is set in the present-day New York, and it’s a musical. But that said, you won’t find a more conflicted, more hesitant, more self-doubting, more soliloquy-prone character on a New York stage this season—certainly not one who can belt out a song like this.

If/Then is a product of the same creative team that brought Next to Normal to Broadway five years ago, winning three Tony awards as well as a Pulitzer. The new show borrows a split narrative device from the 1998 Gwyneth Paltrow movie Sliding Doors (and there must be older antecedents than that) with twin stories about the same heroine diverging from a single point in time: here’s what happens if Elizabeth, a romantically-bruised single woman “flirting with 40,” goes with one friend to listen to a street musician in a park; and here’s what happens if Elizabeth accompanies a second friend to an affordable-housing protest. (Those are her choices? No wonder she’s depressed.) Will she find love? Will she find a job that actually makes use of her talents? Will the audience care enough to return from their intermission Milk Duds?

This ambitious mixed bag of a show is ostensibly about fate, destiny, chance, choice, alternate lives, stuff like that. The characters talk about “signs,” about their destinies being written in “the stars,” and, of course, since this is in essence a romantic comedy-drama, about finding “the one” —if “the one” even exists. (Spoiler: he does, but it’s complicated.) Are these questions interesting, even by the relatively low philosophical standards of the Broadway musical? (Personally, I believe in inertia, not fate.) At times, the first act played like a cross between a dorm-room bull session and an oratorio, at once abstract and jejune—and staged in a style that was spare yet irritatingly busy. A mirrored backdrop, which sometimes became a ceiling, maybe made conceptual sense—mirrored lives, mirrored destinies! —but looked like it belonged in an 80s night club and proved distracting. I’d wager front-row audiences aren’t paying top-ticket Broadway prices to see themselves over Idina Menzel’s shoulder.

So, the good news: If/Then is the rare musical with a second act much stronger than its first. It focuses rather than fizzles. Cosmic concerns are trumped by psychological ones; questions of fate and destiny devolve into nittier-grittier issues of regret, ambivalence, conflicting emotions, hesitancy, risk-taking. A partial list of song titles will give you some flavor:

“You Never Know”

“What the Fuck?”

“Here I Go”

“Best Worst Mistake”

“I Hate You”

A chorus of “To be or not to be” wouldn’t be out of place here. The songs, by composer Tom Kitt and lyricist Brian Yorkey (who also wrote the book) have less of a rock edge than their score for Next to Normal; it fits more easily into the pop/rock/show-tune mélange that has become Broadway’s contemporary normal. Come to think of it, Menzel’s big hit from Frozen, “Let It Go,” wouldn’t be out of place here either, thematically or musically.

Speaking of the star, this is clearly designed to be her show, from the first spotlight and line of dialogue—“I get lost in what might be”—but, at times, given the complexities of forming twin stories while introducing a half dozen or so other characters whose lives are also twinned, Menzel gets lost in a literal shuffle of characters and scenic elements and the figurative gear-grinding of plot mechanics. Once things slow down, however, and once she’s given an actual character to play, rather than a conceit, she blossoms, and the show blossoms with her—jokes land, emotions are felt rather than telegraphed, the audience maybe feels something too.

Not that If/Then is ever as moving as the devastating Next to Normal, which was held together by Alice Ripley’s performance as a mother suffering from bipolar disorder—and If/Then is not really meant to be as moving, I think. But in the penultimate number, “Always Starting Over,” which Menzel sings solo, spotlighted on an otherwise dark stage, she holds the audience not just with her voice—big, but not that big—but through sheer force of will. I felt as if I were in the grip of a diva tractor beam, as if star power had a gravitational pull. This is a genuine physical sensation by the way. I've felt it twice before, with Sutton Foster, in the 2011 revival of Anything Goes, and Liza Minnelli in a one-woman show several lifetimes ago. Broadway legend has it that Ethel Merman's gravitation pull was so strong she would bend light waves.

Off Broadway, another odd-duck musical opened this week—Heathers: The Musical, based on the 1988 film that made stars out of Winona Ryder and Christian Slater. Turning Heathers into a musical might seem like a good idea. I thought so. But what I learned from seeing it is this: if you’re going to make a musical based on a black comedy about teen suicide, bulimia, date rape, and other unpleasant facts of high school life, and if the story ends with the trench-coat-wearing hero attempting to blow up a school, you better get the tone exactly right. The film’s director, Michael Lehmann, did. For some reason, however, the musical’s creative team chose to add doses of sincerity to the original’s deadpan causticness. The result curdles. Of course, the musical has a harder job than the film, since it takes place in a post-Columbine world, and because the genial but not particularly interesting leads have to live up to memories of Ryder and Slater (neither of whom were ever better). All the more reason to wonder then: Why?